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Greetings, All. My apologies for my absence. I have a new post on Kate Middleton ready to go but wanted to play a little Cambridge Catch-Up before hitting publish on Thursday’s SportsAid event.

Prince William has had two royal firsts since my last post. After 33 years of princing, Prince William finally went to the The Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show on May 23rd.

The flower show was a first for Kate, too. When Kensington Palace’s Press Office suggested on social media that Prince Harry was a Chelsea Flower Show tag-along newbie, royal watchers quickly corrected them and reminded them of Prince Harry’s previous appearances.

Even though Prince Harry may come in third in the Palace Press Office hierarchy, royal watchers are getting frustrated with how much Jason Knauf’s PR team keeps dropping the ball when it comes to Harry’s work. I think Prince Harry’s supporters need a nickname like Beyoncé’s BeyHive. We could be… the Ginger Rooters? We’ll work on the name.

At the flower show, Prince William looked just as miserable as one would expect a Reluctant Prince who allegedly thinks flower shows and ribbon cuttings are ridiculous royal duties.

The above Daily Mail screen grab is now one of my very favorite royal photos, mainly because Prince William has never looked more like Bert from Sesame Street than at that moment.

The Daily Mail provided a bevy of snaps for Keeping up With the Kambridges screen grabbing. Kate was almost all of the Seven Dwarfs in them.

Sneezy:

Sleepy:

Dopey:

And Happy:

One Daily Mail commenter thought Kate looked more like a garden gnome than a Disney dwarf, though.

The Chelsea Flower Show also had an incredible installation in honor of The Royal Horticultural Society’s Patron’s 90th Birthday.

Among the flowers on display were two that had been named after the Cambridge’s children.

Before the show, there was a Kate sighting by a Twitter user.

On the 24th, Kate was papped with Prince George and Princess Charlotte. Prince George was sitting on a Met Police motorbike with the assistance of four police officers, holding on to the handlebars as he pretended to drive it. The Cambridge privacy line became even blurrier when media outlets in the UK were permitted to print the photos.

The photos of Prince George were reminiscent of ones taken of Prince William and Prince Harry when they were young.

Perhaps the Cambridge’s objections to having their photos taken “off-duty” has more to do with the story the pictures tell. The photos of Prince George on a police motorbike with his mother and sister nearby are image-friendly, photos of him with his nanny are not.

While the Cambridges seem to be on a campaign to ultimately control their image using social media, social media itself is uncontrollable. The motorbike photos which many initially assumed would only appear in overseas publications were Retweeted with Kate’s dress identified in less time than it takes to find Waldo.

Later that day, Kate slipped into the same cream Alexander McQueen coat dress and Jane Taylor fascinator she wore to Prince George’s christening to go with Prince William to his very first Buckingham Palace Garden Party.

Even Kate has gone to those and yet somehow her 33-year-old blood royal future king husband remained a Buckingham Palace Garden Party virgin until May 24th of this year.

Jennifer @Chic_Happens_ Tweeted a photo of Princess Diana wearing an outfit very similar to Kate’s Buckingham Palace Garden Party attire. I inserted a photo of Kate next to it for the sake of easy comparison. Soooooo, yeah, that happened.

Kate also had her glam squad with her at the Garden Party: PA/stylist Natasha Archer and her hair stylist Amanda Cook Tucker. Natasha’s boyfriend, royal photographer Chris Jackson, also managed to score an invite. According to royal.uk, invites to the royal garden parties are a “way of recognising and rewarding public service”.

Did Amanda Cook Tucker have to swallow a balloon full of wiglets to smuggle them into India or something for this most recent tour? Nothing about Kate’s garden party hair suggested a need for an emergency stylist to be standing by.

Then on May 28th, the Daily Mail ran a piece on Prince William and Kate taking a private chartered helicopter back to Anmer Hall after Tuesday’s Buckingham Palace Garden Party at a cost of approximately £5,000. And the response of DM readers was pretty much what you’d expect.

What I find interesting is that this helicopter had been chartered at all, considering The Queen has a Sikorsky S-76++ registration number G-XXEB which is primarily used by Prince Charles and in July 2014, the Queen leased an AgustaWestland A109S to be used by William, Kate and other members of the Royal Family. So why the need to charter a third helicopter? Who was using the other two? Hopefully Prince Andrew didn’t swap them in some kind of shady business deal for magic beans.

But then photos of a Cambridge family outing at the Houghton Hall International Horse Trials with blue bows and matching stripes were published by various outlets such as The Mirror bringing a little peace to the land and a bit more haziness to the Cambridge’s privacy expectations.

Well, Kate Middleton is off for another week-long sun-filled get-away, this time with husband, Prince William. The couple, dubbed “UK’s Laziest Royals” earlier this year by the press (how funny would a Coat of Arms be for that title, maybe something with a Coppertone bottle and some High Street shopping bags) arrived in Maldives at 9:40am Thursday.

It’s been a whole month since Lazy Katie has had a proper vacation and the poor girl must be utterly exhausted from her three whole engagements this year. After the National Portrait Gallery appearance discussed in the previous post “Worth the Wait?”, she opened an Art Room at the Northolt High School where she played with her hair a lot and tilted her head, probably contemplating some great sociological issue like whether or not she should get bangs (she totally should).

She did the obligatory photo with children picture, even though the children didn’t appear to be particularly riveted.

Then on February 17th, she bravely nodded her head a lot during some celebrity small talk at the Queen’s Buckingham Palace Dramatic Arts reception. Let’s just dispense with the formalities and give Kate the Nobel Peace Prize right now.

With Lazy Katie’s tan from her Mustique vacation still not faded, this so-called romantic get-away with Prince William is odd timing. They just had a couple’s night out over the weekend at Louise Aubrey-Fletcher’s birthday party at Bunga Bunga. That looked super-romantic, the way Kate was trying to figure out what was going on while Prince William was half-way to the car.

Don’t worry, she caught up to him while he was getting in the car and didn’t have to call Pippa for a ride home.

This Maldives vacation is also strange considering William is supposed to be presently taking a ten-week agriculture course at Cambridge. I’m sure someone within Prince Charles’ press office is shaking a Magic 8 Ball to come up with a perfectly valid explanation why Prince William doesn’t have any classes this week.

Now, I know it can be stressful when the care of your child is being transferred from the old nanny to the new nanny, there could be all of those tedious questions, like what are those prosthetic stomaches doing in the linen closet. But come on, how much longer before eye-rolling provoked by these vacation announcements starts doing some serious ocular damage? Seriously, I’ve been getting these weird spasms around my left eye, I’m afraid I’m going to wind up needing an eye patch and one of those big white plastic cones dogs have to wear after surgery.

The Lazy Duo can manage to squeeze in a week’s worth of frolicking in the ocean but they insult the Maori King by refusing to grant him more than 90 minutes in their upcoming tour of Australia and New Zealand? King Tuheitia has said no thanks to the quickie and has refused to meet with them. They’ve also ticked off another Maori leader by opting not to include historically significant Waitangi on the tour. Perhaps they felt it was just too ripe for Waity in Waitangi headlines. There’s already a strong movement within New Zealand to cut ties with the British Crown and Australia is peeved New Zealand might beat them to the punch of full independence. This seventeen day royal tour, which has three scheduled “Rest Days”, has received a lot of press for Kate’s anticipated longer hemlines and borrowed jewels but thus far it looks like Prince William and Kate have packed a little too lightly when it comes to good will.

Three days of work this year and fourteen days spent frolicking in the surf. How does this girl not realize she has the potential to bring global attention to important issues and could do so much good? Does she just not care?

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